Abstract
At first sight, the suffixal inflection of Polish masculine nouns violates massively the No Blur Principle proposed by Carstairs-McCarthy (1994) as a constraint on inflection class proliferation but, when stem alternation is taken into account, Polish turns out to comply with the No Blur Principle perfectly - provided that characteristics of stem alternants are permitted to be constitute part of the 'meaning' of affixes, i.e., to be morphological signata. This supports the hypothesis that affixal inflection and nonaffixal inflection are subject to different constraints, and sheds new light on how the two kinds of inflection can interact. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
| Original language | English |
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| Pages (from-to) | 813-835 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Natural Language and Linguistic Theory |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2000 |